Category Archives: Personally

Men’s tears among handmade ceramics

Maybe I’ve become more sensitive, but I think I see lots of men’s tears nowadays. It’s not because I watch reality shows. Big Brother, the Voice, Hell’s Kitchen, tears provoked for the ratings I ignore. I will also have nothing to do with tears for emotional blackmail.

No, I mean real tears, like president Obama’s , but then in the ceramics scene. Keith Brymer Jones in his judging at The Great Pottery Throw Down comes to mind. But there are more ceramists who have become immersed in modernizing male emotions.

Will the twenties be the emotional catch-up for modern male ceramists?

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New Decade: Roaring Twenties Ceramics

A new decade has begun, time for roaring twenties ceramics. No I don’t mean vintage ceramics from the twenties of the last century, but freshly fired 21st century ceramics.

No matter how much I love historical ceramics, the current handmade ceramic tradition can only be maintained by making it now.

And the ceramic tradition is still very much alive, judging from what I’m all encountering on Insta. The hashtag #ceramics has 10 million posts on Instagram. Okay not as popular as #Love (2 billion), #Fashion (759 million) or #Art (583 million), but still 10 million is nothing to sneeze at.

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Panta Rhei, Memento Mori

Panta Rhei, everything flows, everything changes, nothing is permanent (Heraclitus, 540-480 BCE). Everything is perishable, life is perishable, my life is perishable. Memento mori.

A rock in the surf, immortalized in art, indestructible ceramics. Forms made permanent by fire. A continuous tradition of millennia in the history of mankind. Everything seems forever.

But appearances deceive, everything flows. Life is flowing, even if we have to say good bye.

Panta Rhei.

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Even the gods have to make clay test tiles

All ceramists make clay test tiles.  These are used to see if the clay is suitable for work and firing at the desired temperature. But these small clay tiles are also used to see if the glaze is good and suitable for that clay.

My stock of test tiles started to come to an end, so it was time to make new ones. Devising and making glaze tests is second nature for me. This is what makes ceramics so different from other art forms. A writer is not going to develop a PC before he starts writing.

Making clay test tilesMaking clay test tilesClay test tiles unfiredClay test tiles stackedBut a ceramist, who makes his own work, cannot escape pre-testing. Can’t escape the technique of making. Can’t escape the laws of nature. Even the gods cannot escape from making clay test tiles…

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Museum Bernard Palissy, Saint Avit

With this third blog about Museum Bernard Palissy I conclude my French ceramics triptych of the past few weeks. It was Palissy who lured us to southern France this year. A fitting ending to finish at his birthplace, Saint Avit

More than 500 years after his birth, the myth of Palissy lives on. One of the first ceramists to stil known by name with his own “rustic” style. A style that has had counterfeiters, imitator and followers to the present day.

Bernard Palissy in Museum Bernard PalissyA renaissance ceramist, scientist, writer and martyr. Died in captivity, glaze secrets taken into his grave. Loved by the French ceramics connoisseurs. His myth, even outside France, still appeals to the imagination.

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Died glaze secrets of Bernard Palissy

Bernard Palissy looks at his last wood being digested by the flames. But the ceramics kiln roars like a hungry wolf for more. With tears in his eyes of smoke, sweat, fatigue and despair he scans the room. Floor shelves, tables, chairs and everything else that burns fall prey to his kiln. He will and he must reach the temperature to melt his glazes…

Saintes around 1540 in the south of France. Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) experiments as a man possessed. Or insane as his neighbors claim. He is looking for an elusive glaze that he got to know on one of his distant travels.

His wife and children are threatening to leave him. Nevertheless, he put everything at risk to develop a glaze, which is unprecedented in 16th century France.

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A ceramics enthusiast in the South of France

What does a ceramics enthusiast look for in southern France? As a child in a candy factory. Just one problem. There is so much ceramics in the south of France that you can’t possibly see everything at once.

When I think of ceramics in the South of France, I smell the lavender mixed with goat cheese. Then I see green hills where rivers splash through the landscape. From a corner of my eye, a salamander shoots away, warming up to the sun’s rays shooting through the canopy. And just below it … lies gold. Black or white, it is for the taking or actually for excavation.

This is also the region where 500 years ago Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) grew up. The landscape he walked through looking for work. He didn’t only found work, he was also inspired by it. He went looking for his “Recepte Véritable“, the true recipe of the earth, ceramics, glazes and the rest of life.

An Artist's travel guide to the Ceramics Museums of Europe, Alexandra Copeland (1999) I am always looking for the true recipe, so this summer I went to the country of Palissy with my girlfriend. … With in my pocket “an artist’s travel guide to the Ceramics Museums of Europe” (Don’t leave home without it).

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Hand-made ceramics pictures

It is again (well almost) vacation, so time for (drum roll) handmade ceramics pictures. Why?

Next year a new NVK-Ceramics member guide will be released with all the affiliated ceramic artists form the Netherlands and Belgium (yeah!!). But that also means I had to go to work…

No, not to make new ceramic sculptures, but to capture my new work digitally. In this online world a significant part of making ceramics. And whoever makes his own ceramics, also takes his own photos.

DFB-Ceramic Bottle BirdI hear you thinking, “that you are taking your own pics, is really obvious“.

Okay, fair point, you don’t have to take your own photos. It’s hard enough to make ceramics. But I like to learn things by doing it myself. That is the nature of this beast. Continue reading Hand-made ceramics pictures

Ceramics packing Friday

Today is packing Friday. No departure or farewell, it is for the ceramics sale. When I am selling online I usually send it also on a Friday (so I call that too packing Friday). But now it’s for the ceramics fair.

Packing ceramics for shipment is already an art, packing for a fair or exposition requires planning. A planning I usually start (too) late ….

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Handmade ceramics, a hand-kiss to the past

Handmade ceramics are thousands of years old. But the paintings that have been discovered in caves in the past hundred years all over the world are much much older.

In 1903, one of the first cave paintings was discovered in Spain: the cave of El Castillo. At this time, hundreds of caves with paintings have been discovered in Europe, but also in the rest of the world.

Hand made ceramic Hand bowls biscuit

The oldest of these images are the hand stencils. These are prints of color pigments, where the hand is used as a stencil. This resulted in a negative hand-print, which to this day kindly waves at us.

Time to wave back….

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Terra Sig: Personal Ceramics Projects

At the moment I am studying the Terra Sig technique. Making time for your personal ceramics projects is important, at least for me.

The last months I have been working hard to give an advice on a local (pottery) clay, on a survey among the readers of my newsletter and following a branding course. All worth my time and effort.

Terra Sig weighing TestesHowever instructive this was, sometimes I encounter a technique that I want to investigate further. Ceramics is a field where many techniques play a role. I always like to read about all kinds of methods. But to “really” get to know a technique I have to put theory into practice.

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Feeling blue, blue glaze magic

2019 has just started and “I am feeling Blue“. No I don’t have the blues, I really feel blue……… that is to say glaze blue.

The first firing of this year I tried some new glazes. Glazes I developed and tried on test tiles. But you will only get to know a glaze for real when you use it. And fortunately, also “in the real“, this glaze suits me very well.

Glaze Blue-OvenEach glaze has its own origin. This blue glaze started as a muddy kind of brown…

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